Jakarta Struts Cookbook

Chapter 14. Tiles and Other Presentation Approaches

Introduction

Struts is primarily intended to provide the controller for web applications. Some developers immediately associate Struts with the Struts JSP tags, but any Struts enthusiast will tell you that the Struts controller framework and API, not the tags, comprise the heart of the framework. You can limit, augment, and even replace your use of the Struts view-rendering features and still gain many of the advantages afforded by Struts.

The first half of this chapter focuses on Tiles. This framework, distributed and integrated with Struts, provides a robust approach for reusing pages and page layouts across your application. If you've never used Tiles, you'll find recipes to get you started along with some more advanced uses of Tiles. The second half of this chapter takes a step back and shows you how to use new ways of generating HTML within the context of a Struts application.

The topics in this chapter, particularly the latter half, are broader in scope than most of the recipes in this book. Entire books have been written about some of these technologies, such as Java ServerFaces and XSLT, and it would be impossible to cover them completely in a single chapter, let alone a single recipe. The recipes here will help you get started using these technologies and will give you some insight and understanding on the technology and its application.